Speed up the heat up time of your 3D printer heated bed

Have you been finding your 3D printer heated bed takes a long time to heat up? Been thinking about upgrading your power supply to a 24V or more seriously mains AC power? Have a go at this handy hack before you spend any money.

Just tape some corrugated cardboard to the bottom of your bed! Thats it!

I did this with a MkIII alumuminium 220×220 bed runing at 12V and have no issues achieving 110 degrees celsius for my ABS printing in less than 4 minutes, which used to take closer to 15 minutes (and would just barely make it!) before this hack.

Cork is commonly used for this same purpose, has (almost) the same flame characteristics as Cardboard, but doesn’t have the nice built in insulating air gap that the cardboard has 🙂

Safety

Now you’ll ask, won’t it catch fire? The fire point for cardboard is approximately 250 degrees Celsius, with a flash point closer to 450 degrees Celsius.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing this if you plan to go beyond 110 degrees Celsius with your bed, or if your bed has a history of temperature runaway.

Either way I would certainly not recommend your printer ever being unsupervised or not having a fire alarm setup in the same room in case any unforeseen issues should occur. Use at your own risk!